Episode 29 Who Is My Neighbor?

As the waiter placed the meal on our table, my friend asked if I would offer the blessing.  When I said, “Amen” my friend said “You forgot to say ‘the hands that provided it’.”  I’m not sure anyone had critiqued my prayer aloud since seminary, so it took me a minute to figure out what my friend meant by “and the hands that provided it.”    I had remembered to give thanks to God, but had forgotten the human hands that provided for us: our waiter, barista, chef, delivery drivers, grocers, and farmers. You could go deeper in gratitude and remember those who taught culinary arts, ran utility lines, engineered the grid, made the table, washed the dishes, and hauled away our trash.  Recounting his own morning routine, Rev Dr Martin Luther King made connections all sound the world concluding, “all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly… This is the way our universe is structured, this is (our world’s) interrelated quality.”  “A Christmas Sermon on Peace” Dr King thought remembering our deep interconnectivity is essential for finding peace.  Such prayer can draw us deeply into our human interconnectivity and might help us love our neighbors as ourselves.